Rajiv Kumar Doley, the chairman of the media cell of the university, said they had moved up from 131-140 past year.

The University of the Philippines (UP) ranked 156th among the top universities in Asia.

The achievement is particularly impressive as it comes against a background of increasingly intense competition, especially from China, and of course the Times Higher Education rankings evaluate universities across a rigorous and balanced range of metrics covering not just research excellence, but also innovation, internationalisation and teaching excellence too.

In the latest results, the university has improved its performance in nearly all areas of the ranking, namely in teaching, research, citation impact and knowledge transfer. According to the report, among the factors which affected the rankings were teaching, research, knowledge transfer and worldwide outlook.

"After tens of billions of dollars invested under 1995's Project 211 and 1998's Project 985 to create world-class universities in China, yet more vast investment is secured through 2017's "Double First Class" plan to lift China's leading institutions even higher", he adds.

While IISc and IIT-Bombay dropped by two places to 29 and 44, IIT-Madras fell from the 41st position in 2017 to 103rd place in 2018.

"We are delighted that NUS continues to be Asia's best in the latest rankings by the Times Higher Education".

The ranking analysis found that the country's good performance is attributed to points earned in areas of research productivity despite the country's weak research environment. Its only area of decline was teaching reputation.

India, the third-most-represented country in the list, with 42 institutions, has also seen its average citation impact scores go up, although not as strongly as China.